It's not going to make it more exciting, the problem is in recent years there's been 1 team every season that has a car with a significant advantage over all the other cars and because of this the conclusion of the race is almost a forgone conclusion even before 1st practice starts.

If they want to make the racing closer and therefore more "exciting" start giving graduated weight penalties to drivers leading the championship. Yes it punishes good drivers with good cars but it would stop 1 team running away with the title as the further ahead in points they got the bigger the weight penalty they would have to carry.

A standing start is the most exciting thing in motor racing for me.
If they just stopped them on the grid rather than have them do empty laps behind the safety car that would be a step forward too. I know there would be overheating issues though.

Overheating engines, a sense of disruption - nah. If they're going to change anything, then change how the leader can retake the lead after changing tyres during the SC period. I dunno exactly how that works, but I'd rather see cars gaining some benefit staying out on old tyres. No idea how that could be made to work.

Doesn't it happen because the leader has enough of a gap to stop anyway? Or at least if 2nd and 3rd also dive into the pits he has. I don't think there's any retaking going on, though I'll admit my brain tends to find more interesting things to do as soon as the SC light comes on, so I may well have missed something.

The thing is, a single file restart behind the safety car is the only way of restarting a race with the least amount of carnage.

Just look at Indycar, they've tried pretty much everything except firing them out of a cannon at a restart and the only one that didn't introduce half the grid to the walls were single file behind the pace car.

Ideally they'd stop the race to avoid 'wasted' laps and then release them after a single warmup lap. This insistence on improving the 'show' is half cocked as it's the constantly unstable rules that are killing the sport. Lock the rules for 5 years and within a couple of seasons the field would be pretty level.

mal wrote:
Doesn't it happen because the leader has enough of a gap to stop anyway? Or at least if 2nd and 3rd also dive into the pits he has. I don't think there's any retaking going on, though I'll admit my brain tends to find more interesting things to do as soon as the SC light comes on, so I may well have missed something.

Basically this. The SC picks up the race leader at the first corner, and the rest fall in behind. If the leader pits, without a sufficient gap to second (who then doesn't pit), second place takes the lead and falls directly behind the SC.

Kostabi wrote:
The thing is, a single file restart behind the safety car is the only way of restarting a race with the least amount of carnage.

Just look at Indycar, they've tried pretty much everything except firing them out of a cannon at a restart and the only one that didn't introduce half the grid to the walls were single file behind the pace car.

Ideally they'd stop the race to avoid 'wasted' laps and then release them after a single warmup lap. This insistence on improving the 'show' is half cocked as it's the constantly unstable rules that are killing the sport. Lock the rules for 5 years and within a couple of seasons the field would be pretty level.

F1 has never (and should never be IMHO) been about a level field. There's plenty of other spec series for that if it's what people want. Stifling innovation and development is the problem, if there is one.

Ant Davidson posed an interesting question yesterday during practice - what would people watch if all the drivers swapped between gp2 and f1?